The influence of syllable position on children's production of consonants

Two studies examined consonant production by 13 children with delayed phonological skills. Study 1 examined patterns of substitution errors in word-initial, word-final and intervocalic positions of two-syllable words with a strong-weak stress pattern. For phonemes that were misarticulated in at least one word position, intervocalic consonant production was most likely to be the same as the word-final consonant production, but different from the word-initial consonant production. Study 2 examined proportions of matches and mismatches for features in five positions of multisyllabic words: (1) syllable-initial, word-initial, (2) syllable-initial, within-word, (3) intervocalic before an unstressed syllable, (4) syllable-final, within-word, and (5) syllable-final, word-final. Significant variations in match ratios were observed as a function of syllable position. A number of different patterns of position-dependent errors were observed.